SMART Food For Life

SMART Food for Life is our overarching nutrition education and cooking project that incorporates healthy eating practices throughout all of SMART’s programs and activities, both in-house and in the wider community. Building on the success of our SMART Body cooking classes, we have honed our focus on “food as treatment,” expanding our outreach at health fairs and community venues throughout East Harlem. We are committed to sharing nutrition information, healthy cooking techniques, healthy adaptations of traditional ethnic dishes, and low-cost recipes with anyone interested in learning to prepare healthy delicious meals on a budget- well beyond people who are living with HIV.

The SMART Food For Life initiative includes:

SMART Body

A hands-on cooking and nutrition education class, teaches healthy eating and safe good preparation to help students heal and manage chronic illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Weekly topics incorporate a variety of local, seasonal, and ethnic ingredients as participants create delicious dishes together. Pantry bags are distributed at the end of each class!

SMART Body Community

The “mobile” iteration of our proven nutrition education and hands-on cooking curriculum, whereby we take our classes into the community, e.g., health fairs, senior centers, youth groups, etc., as an expansion of the in-house programs, activities, and events we offer on a weekly basis.